86 Time February 15/February 22, 2021
The Black Renaissance MOVIES + TELEVISION
portrays African Americans—played by
white actors in blackface—as predators
or simpletons unfit for freedom, and the
Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the antebel-
lum South. The movie was instrumental
to the Klan’s revival and the flourishing
of Jim Crow laws.
Over the following decades, main-
stream films like Song of the South, Gone
With the Wind and the Shirley Temple–
starring The Littlest Rebel would confer
nostalgia upon plantation life and por-
tray the enslaved as grateful to their pro-
tective owners. Later, when white film-
makers tackled America’s original sin
or the civil rights movement, they often
made Black characters ancillary to rous-
ing white allies (Amistad, Glory); white
audiences left the theater with no inkling
of complicity in racist structures. “We’ve
been treated as objects as opposed to
subjects,” Ellis says. “Even in the well-
intentioned, liberal movies in the ’80s
and ’90s, Hollywood just couldn’t get
its head wrapped around the Black
experience.”
In a lily-white industry, a few Black
filmmakers, including Spike Lee and
John Singleton, were able to break
through and portray Black stories with
richness and depth. But attempting to
expose more shameful parts of American
history proved difficult. Lee’s Malcolm X,
released in 1992, was saved financially
only after he solicited prominent Black
donors like Michael Jordan and Oprah
Winfrey. Singleton said that Rosewood
(1997), which recounted the 1923 mas-
sacre of a predominantly Black Florida
town at the hands of a white mob, re-
ceived scant studio support, which con-
tributed to its commercial failure.
Also in the ’90s, New Jack City film-
maker Van Peebles began shopping
around a script for a movie that cast the
Black Panthers in a new light. He knew
history books and mainstream media
had reduced them to their militance,
and he wanted to highlight their efforts
to feed and protect their communities
and combat police brutality—and their
treatment by the FBI. But Van Peebles
couldn’t get studios to greenlight a proj-
ect with a significant budget.
“One studio executive said, ‘I dig
the script; I was a radical and love the
Panthers. But we have to make the lead
character white,’ ” he recalls. The execu-
tive suggested casting “a Bridget Fonda
type” who teaches a group of Black men
to read, leading to their becoming the
Black Panthers. Van Peebles eventually
got to make Panther the way he wanted,
for $9 million. It failed to recoup its
costs.Recent stRuctuRal changes in
Hollywood have led to more Black cre-
ators’ getting their own platforms to tell
Black stories. The Black Lives Matter
and #OscarsSoWhite movements put
pressure on white gatekeepers, while
box-office successes like Moonlight,
Get Out and especially the Marvel epic
Black Panther showed that Black sto-
ries of all stripes could draw audiences.
The advent of streaming has widened
the conception of what an “average”
theatergoer looks like. And Black ex-
ecutives, like Warner Bros.’ Channing
Dungey, finally started to get promoted
into decision making positions. The re-
sult has been a flurry of Black stories
across genres, from romance (If Beale
Street Could Talk) to horror (Us) to com-
edy (Girls Trip).
Given Hollywood’s obsession with
true stories, it’s not surprising that
Black creators would use these oppor-
tunities to reclaim forgotten chapters of
history. These films and TV shows serve
both as validation for Black audiences—
who have long had to protect their sto-
ries themselves—and as civic lessons for
those less informed. And these proj ects
have already started to make an impact
on the nation’s collective memory. Du-
Vernay’s 13th, for example, has been
added to high school and college cur-
riculums for its incisive exploration of
mass incarceration’s ties to slavery. Her
series When They See Us was Netflix’s
most watched series in the U.S. every
day for two weeks upon its release—
and led to Central Park Five prosecutor
Linda Fairstein’s being dropped by her
publisher and resigning from the board
of Vassar College amid public outrage.
“For years, our stories have been told
and commodified in a way that reduced
us in other people’s eyes and in our own
eyes,” When They See Us screenwriter
Julian Breece says. “It’s important for us
to rescue our narrative—because that’s
what rescues our humanity.”
In 2019, after its depiction in HBO’sHISTORY
IN THE
REMAKING
Clockwise from top: Scenes
from Mrs. America, When
They See Us and Pose. “It’s a
mission of mine to give life,
nuance and intimacy to those
stories that most people are
less aware of,” Tanya Barfield,
a playwright and a writer
for Mrs. America, says. She
guided the show’s depiction of
1972 presidential candidate
Shirley Chisholm.